Kath Duncan, communist political activist in 1920s and 30s
Deptford, is the subject of a new play Liberty and a biography The #Last Queen
of Scotland by Ray Barron Woolford. Red Blouse Theatre, a local radical theatre
company first formed in the 1930s and newly re-formed for the Deptford Heritage
Festival, will stage the play in February 2019.
Katherine Sinclair Duncan (nee MacColl) was born in 1888
Argyllshire, Scotland. She became a teacher and joined the National Union of
Teachers (NUT). After a marriage of convenience to Alexander “Sandy” Duncan in
1923, the couple moved to Hackney. They joined the Hackney Labour Dramatic
Group, part of the Workers Theatre Movement, a revolutionary, left-wing theatre
movement which had it’s origins in the Russian revolution of 1917. After a time
in the Independent Labour Party, she joined the Communist Party of Great
Britain because of the UK General Strike of 1926.
In 1929 she was elected to the party’s central committee,
but stood down a year later when she moved to Deptford. During the 1931 General
Election she hit the local headlines as the communist party candidate for
Greenwich where she received over 2,000 votes.
A powerful public speaker at demonstrations, town hall
deputations and street meetings, she championed the National Unemployed Workers
Movement and other working class causes such as opposing the Means Test,
defending the rights of Lewisham street-traders, supporting the hunger marchers
and the South London gas charges protest (“The great Gas Fight”) of 1936.
 |
| Kath Duncan addressing a crowd during the great Gas Fight. |
In 1932, local dockers demonstrated against ships sending
arms to Japan which had just invaded Manchuria, China. Opposed to fascism and
war, Kath spoke at a demonstration in Woolwich and was hospitalised after the
police charged the crowd. Demonstrating the next day in what became “The Battle
of Deptford Broadway”, Kath was charged with disturbing the peace. She refused
to be bound over and so spent a month in Holloway Prison.
After her release the London County Council tried to
remove her name from the teachers list. Helped by a 5,700 strong petition and
letters of support from many Deptford trade unions, Kath soon won this battle
and went on to stand unsuccessfully for the L.C.C (London County Council) in
1934.
Arrested again in 1935 for refusing to stop speaking
outside a New Cross employment exchange in Nynehead Street, she was charged and
convicted of willfully obstructing a police inspector in the execution of his
duty. The National Council for Civil Liberties took up her case, the first time
they had done so. The appeal was dismissed but Duncan v Jones [1936] became a
landmark case. It established that free speech was allowed unless likely to
cause a disturbance. The case has been cited in the courts in defence of the
rights of animal rights protesters, Stonehenge campaigners and demonstrations
at an RAF air base. Red Blouse Theatre, a local radical theatre company first
formed in the 1930s and newly re-formed for the Deptford Heritage Festival,
will stage Liberty.
Later, Kath spent much of her time opposing fascism. She
was involved in the Battle of Cable Street and an active member of the Aid to
Spain Movement, interviewing volunteers for the International Brigade in the
Spanish Civil War.
During the 1945 election, she worked for the Labour Party
addressing envelopes in Deptford Labour Committee rooms even though she had
arthritis in her hands.
After her death, the London District Committee of the
Communist Party published a pamphlet “Deptford’s Tribute to Kath Duncan” which
is available on reference in Lewisham Local History and Archive Centre. Kath
Duncan died in Scotland 1954, but she lives on in the popular memory in
Deptford.
Julie Robinson, Local Studies Librarian, Lewisham Libraries
local.studies@lewisham.gov.uk
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